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Monday, May 31, 2010

LUIZ ALFREDO GARCIA-ROZA

THE SINGULARITY OF BEING A BRAZILIAN AUTHOR

Brazilian crime novelist Luiz AlfredoGarcia-Roza has the distinction of writing elegant prose in Portuguese, a language few people other than Brazilians and Portuguese readers understand. His main character, Inspector Espinosa, is a a great reader and a man of refined sensibilities. temperamentally he is closer to the British gentleman detective Lord Peter Wimsey than to its rougher American counterparts. Unlike Wimsey, Espinosa is a public servant. He has no Oxford diploma, no trust fund and no attitude. His mind is his weapon. His home is Rio de Janeiro, whose great beauty and and great problems are part and parcel of its irresistible appeal. He is the universal urban man who would be at home in New York, Paris or Geneva and he cuts across cultural lines as real cariocas do--gracefully and with enormous charm.

Garcia-Roza's writing is refreshingly free of the exoticism and magical realism of better known Latin writers. It is Spartan in the sense of its self-disciplined restraint and clarity. This in no way implies linguistic impoverishment, but it points to a departure from the exuberance of Jorge Amado and the metaphysical silliness of Paulo Coelho. It deserves a larger audience in the United States.

The following translation is mine and the errors are mine. My text is clunky. It lacks the lovely fluidity of Garcia-Roza's responses, but it is meant as a guide rather than as a literal rendition of his words.

1. O que significa ser um autor brasileiro? What does it mean to be a Brazilian author?

Significa ser autor em um país do Terceiro Mundo cujo idioma é o português que tem pouco ou nenhum acesso ao mercado cultural do Primeiro Mundo; por outro lado, significa ser um autor ainda não viciado por esse mercado e com maior liberdade e possibilidade de quebrar os cânones estabelecidos por ele. Significa também ser autor em um país com uma extensão territorial quase igual a dos Estados Unidos, com quase duzentos milhões de habitantes e uma riqueza cultural considerável. O termo “autor brasileiro” não tem um referente uniforme, mas aponta para uma grande diversidade que abarca desde o autor da Amazônia brasileira, no extremo norte, até o gaucho dos pampas, no extremo sul; distantes quase dez mil quilômetros um do outro, sendo que entre esses extremos temos o eixo Rio - São Paulo: uma concentração urbana na região sudeste com mais de quarenta milhões de habitantes e uma grande diversidade cultural. O que confere ao termo “autor brasileiro” um significado indiscutível e que nos permite empregar o termo no singular é a língua portuguesa. Rica e bela.
It means being an author in a Third World country whose language is Portuguese, which has little or no access to the literary market of the First World. On the other hand, it means being an author who has not been influenced by that market and who has greater freedom and possibilities to break with its established canons. It also means being an author in a country whose territory is nearly the size of that of the United States with almost two hundred million people and considerable cultural riches. The words “Brazilian author” do not have a single meaning. They point to the diversity that encompasses an author from the Amazonian region, in Brazil’s extreme north as well a gaucho from the pampas, in the extreme south. Nearly ten thousand kilometers away, in the Rio-Sao-Paulo area, there is the an urban concentration of forty million people and great cultural diversity. It is the rich and beautiful Portuguese language that gives the term “Brazilian author” its indisputable meaning and allows us to use it as in the singular.
2. Qual e a mais potente ferramenta um autor pode usar para exprimir a dimensao espacial? What is the most powerful tool a writer can use to express a sense place?
A única ferramenta que um autor/escritor pode utilizar para exprimir, seja a dimensão espacial seja qualquer outra coisa, é a palavra escrita. E a natureza dessa expressão vai depender da língua que ele tiver escolhido (que nem sempre é sua língua materna) e o estilo que é o seu próprio e único, sem o que ele não é um autor.

The only powerful tool an author/writer can use to express either a sense of place or anything else is the written word. And the nature of this expression will depend in the language he has chosen (which is not not always his native language) an his style without which he would not be an author is uniquely his own.

Inspector Espinosa and the philosopher of the same name have ethics and a belief in the power of reason in common. These are atributes that are also present in the character Auguste Dupin, created by Edgar Allen Poe, who is considered the creator of the crime fiction genre in literature, in MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE (1841)
I have great admiration for the philosopher Baruch de Espinosa’s (1632-1677) personal integrity as well as for his unshakable ethics and his belief in using the power of reason as a way of transcending prejudice and superstition and as the necessary way of arriving at the truth. There were few philosophers who managed in their public and private lives to achieve this as whole and as as strongly persistent a fusion of ethics and reason. Therefore, the choice of my character’s name besides being a homage to the philosopher Espinosa, it was also an afirmation that the policeman as well as any professional can be ethical and can use reason in his daily work instead of allowing himself to be corrupted and to use physical force as a means of getting to the truth.

4. A parede de livros de Espinosa e uma metafora? Is Espinosa's wall of books a metaphor?

The ‘nothing but books bookshelf ‘ as Espinosa puts it, is not a metaphor. It is real (although the reader may see it or read it as a metaphor the power the language has to stand without the support af an empirical wall). The unorthodox nature of Espinosa’s wall as well as the unusual number of books he owns, considering that he is a police inspector, has to do with his personal life. There is no question that he does not fit into the stereotypical model of a rude and truculent policeman. He is cultured, calm, soft spoken. He has a certain eccentricity, as the standards for policemen go. He likes to visit the used book stalls around the city. He is neither erudite nor an intellectual. He simply learned to like English language books, the pulp fiction his grandmother translated into Portuguese, a job thanks which they were able to support themselves without anyone’s help, especially since there was no one to help them. Espinosa grew up among books, in contact with the authors of the books his grandmother translated. The form of his “bookshelf” is, in itself, an indication of the anarchic nature of his relationship with books and literature.

5. Que aspectos de seu trabalho no campo de da filosofia e da psicnálise entram em seus romances policiais? Which aspects of your work in the fields of philosophy and psychoanalysis come into your crime fiction?

Considering its pulp fiction tradition, crime fiction, has fundamental traits in common with the noblest discourses in Philosophy and Psychoanalysis.The three—and not just crime fiction—have a murder as a point of departure: in the case of philosophy, the murder of Socrates, which compelled Plato to produce a discourse that opposed multiple sayings of the powerful; in the case of psychonalisys, the murder of the father, the Freudian myth of the primitive horde and of King Oedipus. Another common characteristic is that in philosophy and psychoanalysis as well as in crime fiction, is that the departure point is sensible reality. But this sensible reality soon reveals its character as an illusion and the “given” shows itself to be illusory since it is distorted.

At the scene of the crime the detective finds himself in a similar situation to that of the inhabitant of the platonic cave who takes the shadows projected on the wall of the cave for reality. The shadows, as worldly happenings, do not evince their entire truth, but neither are they pure fantasy. Reality carries an ambiguity that causes it to hint at and hide the truth simultaneously. Faced with the illusory nature of facts, the investigator must question the given as a transparent carrier of the truth. The philosopher, as well as the psychoanalyst and his patient, in the same way as the detective, embark on on a search for a truth that goes beyond the immediate given. In crime fiction, as in psychoanalysis and philosophy, the agent of the transition is the method.

The word method in Greek means investigation. He who makes use of the method is an investigator who, depending on the path he follows, can be a Plato or a Descartes. He can also be a Phillip Marlowe or a Sam Spade. Nevertheless, similarities in these three fields do not go much further. Aristotle certainly is not hard-boiled. DashiellHammett/Sam Spade have no metaphysical pretensions nor is the Psychoanalytical Association The Pinkerton Detective Agency… luckily for those of us who are lovers Sophia as much as we are lovers of crime fiction.

6. Como explica a evolucao da linguagem exuberante de tantos autores latinos a seu estilo quase espartano? How do you explain the evolution from the flowery language of so many Latin writers to you almost Spartan style?

What there is of inalienably Brazilian in my books is that besides the language in which they are written, there is Rio de Janeiro, a city-icon and particularly the Copacabana precinct, which is an extremely complex microcosm and which serves as background for Inspector Espinosa’s stories. There is also the fact that I was born and raised in Rio, where I live and Copacabana, which is the part of the city I visit most often. A loving relationship with the city and its suburb came about from this. That is where my Brazilianess was shaped and that is also where Espinosa was born.

Because nearly forty years that preceded this choice were devoted to my life as an academic at the Universiade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, where I taught graduate and post-graduate courses, directed theses and research and coordinated a masters and doctoral program on Psychoanalitic Theory. That combination of activities took up all my time. Everything I wrote during that period ( eight book, articles) had to do with those academic activities.
When I left academia and began to write fiction, between the ages of fifty-nine and sixty, I considered that I would not have time for long apprenticeships, theoretical preparations and extensive endeavors. I had never tried to write fiction. When my first book was published (it won two important literary prizes) the question I asked myself was this, how much time do I have to continue this work? Long novel require years and years to be written. My decision to write less weighty novels of lesser temporal complexity and sense of place stems from that. I thought that the crime novel is a kind of appropriation and rereading of Greek tragedy just as Greek tragedy is an appropriation of mytho-poetics, which pleases me.

To be read and to be recognized by his peers. Besides, of course, having his books on the bestseller list. Another very good thing to happen to a writer is to see his books translated into various languages and to imagine them in different formats and with different covers in the hands of American, British, French, German, Spanish, Italian readers and faraway readers such as Rusians and Greeks. It is a marvelous and at the same time strange experience to hold in your hands a book that you authored and that was published in a language unknown to you to the point that you cannot read either its title or your own name.

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IN THEIR WORDS

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